What Does an SEO do on a Day to Day Basis?

If you’re hiring an SEO either as a consultant or in-house, you might be wondering what an SEO does on a day to day basis.

This is a very important topic because as you’ve probably heard, SEO can take a while to start seeing results (Google says 6-12 months in this video). So knowing what the typical tasks that an SEO should be doing while waiting for those results is a fair point.

The answer to this question, like many SEO questions, is that it depends! But don’t worry, I’m going to breakdown some of the most common tasks that SEOs typically should be working on to get you results.

What Tasks Does an SEO Do on a Day to Day Basis?

In general, the main tasks that an SEO will work on include:

1. content creation

2. website optimization

3. analytics reports

4. link building.

I’ll dive a bit more into each of these.

Common SEO Task #1 – Content Creation

Content creation is a key part of SEO. If you’re SEO doesn’t have access to your website, or is not making any changes to the content on your website, that’s a big red flag.

In order to put your website in the best position to get organic traffic an SEO will either create new content or optimize existing content.

Some of the day to day tasks you might see him or her doing include:

Publishing content on the website

Developing content with your writers or freelancers

Preparing content outlines

Sending you content outlines, drafts, or final copy for review

Your SEO might publish content off-site as well. This is typically known as a “guest post”.

Common SEO Task #2 – Website Optimizations

Another day to day SEO tasks that an SEO will work on is website optimizations. This involves making changes to things like Page titles, header tags, and meta descriptions.

It can also include making changes to internal linking, navigation, and other SEO items like redirects, canonical tags, and robots directives.

Technical SEO something that falls under website optimizations as well. This involves working on things like schema markup, AMP, and sitemaps.

Essentially any change to the website that is not content can be considered a website optimization.

Common SEO Task #3 – Analytics Reports

SEOs check on how many visits and conversions your website is getting to understand how the campaign is going. They also check for keyword rankings for the keywords your business is targeting.

Unless your SEO exports and sends you the analytics reports however, you won’t know that they are working on this. Many SEOs check on traffic and rankings briefly to get review top level KPIs. Then if there are significant improvements or a decline in performance they will dive deeper to understand what’s happening and determine the best corrective action.

So analytics reports can be as quick as 2 minutes or as long as 30 minutes depending on what they find.

Common SEO Task #4 – Link Building

While link building isn’t involved in every single SEO campaign, it’s included in most and therefore it’s something that most SEOs will invest time into on a daily basis.

Typically the creation of linkable assets is done in the beginning of the campaign.

Then the SEO will spend lots of time finding and reaching out to other websites to request a link. This involves lots of emailing back and forth. This is where the SEO will spend most of their time when it comes to link building.

Reviewing link data is something is done continuously to measure campaign performance and find opportunities based on your competitors backlinks. This can take anywhere from a few hours per week to about 5 hours per week depending on the scale of your link building effots.

Conclusion

I hope this guide was helpful. Keep in mind that every SEO campaign is unique and that the day to day tasks of your SEO will vary. This guide includes the most common tasks that SEOs work on.

If you want to get a better picture of what your existing SEO is up to you should coordinate with them to get details.

If you want to know what your potential SEO candidate should be working on you should ask them while interviewing.